Category: Thinking, thinking

Her Lady

Five foot eight inches tall, rumored to be white with short dark hair and perpetually wearing sunglasses, the woman behind the Stellar Queen was mysterious.

She was at least eight hundred years old, well-established because she’d lived on the Stellar Queen for that long. Such a long life on one ship leads to rumors….

I lived for fifty years as a child and man on the Stellar Queen, enjoying my second childhood on the ship after I initiated my Do-over, so I was always watching out for her. I was never certain I saw her. There were rumors….

Her appearance was challenging not just because she was rarely seen but also because she practiced genetic designing to shape shift, leading her appearance to often change, even becoming an animal, such as the panther that was claimed to live on the Stellar Queen, or one of the unicorns in the forest. At least, those were were the rumors….

The Stellar Queen was her baby, along with Doctor Jharun Pollux, great-granddaughter of Doctor Jerol Pollux. Doctor Jerol Pollux was the famous discoverer of the dark elements. The elder Doctor Pollux, a funny point to write, was but twenty-four when she made her discoveries a hundred years before her great-granddaughter’s birth. Jharun Pollux and Her Lady were said to be contemporaries in their youth, and struck up a relationship from that era. ‘That era’ was when space exploration and colonization began blossoming, thanks to the dark elements of the elder doctor’s findings, but it was almost three hundred years later that the two women began collaborating on the Stellar Queen’s design and construction.

Most critically for the Stellar Queen, Doctor Pollux incorporated power generators using asteridium, chiridium, and lumenirium. Asteridium was the black element most commonly used in starships for propulsion but Pollux used it with a small lumenirium core to create the artificial sun that graced the Stellar Queen’s bio-dome, rising in the east, and setting in the west.

Chiridium was the more interesting choice for the ship’s power. Chiridium, named for chi, after the life force, is rarer, more difficult to mine and control. Myths related to its name and Doctor Jerol Pollux’s comments about it, can never be put down. As a dark element, some say it’s a dark life force. Both Doctors Pollux laughed about that, but with its AI ship overseer, many inhabitants and visitors thought the Stellar Queen was alive. Majorities of people recounted stories and gave interviews stating that something different was felt as soon as you boarded the ship.

Her Lady never made comments about it that anyone ever recorded. As odd and intriguing as her eight hundred year life aboard the Stellar Queen was, her disappearance without notice when she left was equally intriguing. She only told Rei the baker, famous for his goods from Trudy’s Valley, that she was leaving.

Being the only source, naturally, more rumors arose. One rumor was that one of her shapeshifting processes was disrupted, rendering her a monster that couldn’t be fixed, and that she still lived in secret on the Queen. Others claimed that she had never existed, that she had not created the Stellar Queen, but that it created her because the woman who had begun the project had died before it launched. More quietly, it was suggested that perhaps it wasn’t correct to think of the Stellar Queen as two separate entities, but that they were one, yet another project of the great Doctor Jerol Pollux, and her great-granddaughter.

Imagination can be a wild, untamed creature.

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Drift

I’m drifting this morning, unable to meditate, unable to determine why.

Fidgeting through home worries (animals under the house, egads), the cats (what can I do to end these small wars) and my wife’s health, I drift.

Thinking about the weather and the wildfires down south in California, I drift.

Contemplating the economy, housing market and POTUS election, I drift.

Recalling the Stellar Queen, which returned to me after lo these many years (there’s a book, there, Return of the Stellar Queen!), I drift.

Wishing for the ocean and a shore of spray, longing to smell the sea and hear its thunder, I drift.

Listening to the jays and the crows calling and arguing, and the neighbors starting their cars and driving off, I drift.

Recalling enjoyable companions and amber moments of my life, I drift.

Giving up on meditation (for now) I drift into the kitchen and make coffee.

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Homage to the Stellar Queen

Two miles and 43 minutes, the coffee shop walk allows a surfeit of thinking. Today, with summer starting in the northern hemisphere, I thought of the Stellar Queen.

She’s old. I haven’t thought of her in a while. She’s so ancient in my relative life, that her original Word Perfect, PowerPoint and Paint files reside on five and a quarter floppy disks. They were transferred to three and a half inch disks, and then to a hard drive when I bought a tower Dell, in 1999.

The Stellar Queen was my first foray into science fiction. Orson Scott Card told how he liked drawing maps to stimulate his creativity. I designed cars as a child and planned to be an architect (or a rock star) so I took up designing the Stellar Queen on computer.

She was originally built by a patron of the arts who traveled the galaxies. The Lady (never named, and very mysterious) lives in an estate along the edge between the Central Plain and the Northern Mountains. A bio-dome hybrid class ship, the Queen’s bio portion is sixty-seven miles long by fourteen miles wide. Thinking in threes, she had three cities, three towns and three villages, three major climate zones (with many micro climes), and three rivers that flowed down into the Starry Sea, on the ship’s ‘northwestern’ side. One small town, Half Moon Bay, came to be on the Starry Sea, was based upon Half Moon Bay, California, where I resided for a while. The Queen featured a sun that rose in the ship’s east and set in the west, over the sea. It wasn’t a big sea, just large enough for waves, pleasure craft and some fishing. Just big enough for romance.

Three centers, for government & ship operations, markets, and education, were established, along with three wineries, three breweries, three ranches…et cetera. I began many stories about her. Murder on the Stellar Queen, Death Boards the Stellar Queen, Treason on the Stellar Queen, and so on. None were finished nor submitted. I still have them, though, in notebooks, in boxes, in the garage.

I still smile, thinking about the Stellar Queen, and I easily board her. Half Moon Bay on the Queen is a pleasant place to be, to sip wine or beer and contemplate the ocean and sunshine, marvel about traveling the galaxies, and think about the first day of summer in another year.

Time to go write like crazy.

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Missing Work

I used to work. I left IBM at the end of 2015. I’d worked for them for about fifteen years. It’s about fifteen years because they included the time that I worked for other companies that IBM acquired. It’s like Matryoshka dolls. Inside my IBM career are my careers at ISS and Network ICE.

None were really careers. That’s the polite, modern terms for my employment episodes. I sort of miss the employment. If not missing it is zero and missing it is one hundred, I miss it about 27.6. I can assign percentages to that 27.6 rating.

60% of that number is missing the paycheck.

18% is missing the health benefits.

12% is missing the routines.

5% is missing the work.

5% is about missing the people and/or teamwork.

It’s sorry that it breaks down like this but my job had morphed into something bureaucratic, with few challenges, over five years ago. While a member of several teams, what that meant in practical terms was that I sat in on calls and listened 96% of the time, speaking 4% of the time on those calls. Calls accounted for about 30% of my work week, so I listened a lot, spoke little, and spent most of my time alone, reading and answering emails, analyzing problems, planning solutions, writing summaries, and entering information in various systems.

While working there, I no longer received pay raises, or miniscule raises, because I maxed out the amount for my band and geographic area years ago. I did receive a small bonus every year, and the reminder that I was fortunate to have a job in these tough economic times in America. Resource actions, where people’s employment was terminated, were regular, and it wasn’t surprising to find someone I worked with was no longer with the corporation. My morale wasn’t very high. 0-100, I’d put it at 11 when 2015 began. That’s where it stayed for my final year.

But I miss that routine, sometimes, of getting up early and calling into somewhere. I felt most connected then. I worked remotely, that is, from my house, almost three hundred miles from my campus. I visited ‘the old campus’, in Beaverton, Oregon, once. My team was based in Atlanta, Georgia, in the Eastern US time zone, while I’m in the Pacific time zone, a three hour difference. When they started the day at 8:30 AM, I had to call in at 5:30 AM, a dark and cold time in Oregon’s winter. I hadn’t seen any team members for a few years.

I enjoyed the routine of rising and plodding through the dark house, dressing, going into the office and turning on my equipment. Getting on the calls, I’d announce myself, check emails for critical matters, review my lists of things to do and my deadlines, and then listen to the call as I fed the cats, did things around the house, and made and ate breakfast.

It’s lighter now, on summer’s cusp, in the mornings. Because I’m an early riser, I find myself up at 5:30 on many days. It’s a hard habit to break, but I can accuse the cats for some of that early rising. And sometimes, I need to pause and remind myself, there is no work computer to turn on, no emails to check, no meetings to call into. There’s only me and the cats, and the day awakening outside.

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Is it?

Is it?

Me?

Is it you?

Is it us?

Is it our system?

Is it America?

Is it ‘them’,

or ‘their ways’?

Is it the times

We live in

And the lack of morality,

The fast paced world,

Disenfranchisement and bitterness,

Sexual orientation and preference,

Race, color, nationality and religion?

Or is it?

Just

You?

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The Spider Policy

There was a black widow scare the other night. My wife, finishing her bath and wrapped in a towel, called out for me with the warning, “There’s a black widow in the bathroom. Hurry, it’s running.”

So I ran. Grabbing a small plastic food storage container from the kitchen, I rushed down the hall. Followed by my wife, the spider had left the bathroom and was heading down the hall toward the guest room.

I took up pursuit. Closing as the spider reached the guest room carpet, I made a move to capture him. Seeing me coming, the spider accelerated across the floor as my wife said, “Get it, it’s getting away.”

After two attempts, I trapped it in the plastic. It ran in a circle, trying to escape as I studied it. “I don’t think this is a black widow. It’s not shiny and black enough, and doesn’t have that exaggerated shape.” I couldn’t see its underside.

My wife agreed. “What do you want me to do with him?” I asked. “Set him free outside?”

Yes.

I was a little reluctant. He’s clearly a house spider, hence his location, and I knew the yard was spider rich. A black widow lives in the corner of the front porch. She only comes out at night but turn on the light at midnight, and there she is, tensing and waiting.

The spider policy is a no kill, relocation thing. That means we have a lot of spiders around the house. With spiders are webs. I went about yesterday cleaning off all the webby eaves, corners and bushes. The process is to look for a spider in the web, give warning that the web will be removed so the spider has time to leave, and then clean away the web. Probably sixty percent of the webs are vacant, dusty with debris. Spiders built them and perished, or decided they didn’t like the location and moved away.

So many webs were evident yesterday. After 30 minutes of cleaning, I was relatively satisfied and put the broom away. Leaving the garage, I looked up —

And there was another.

I swear it wasn’t there before.

But —

I was done for the day. After a few minutes of contemplating the web and the policy, I headed for the garbage cans. Tomorrow was trash day. Time for other matters.

No spiders were harmed before or after this story. At least not by me. Now, the cats are a whole other matter. They are not as spider tolerant.

But they do leave those black widows alone.

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Not Unimaginable

‘UNIMAGINABLE’

The newspaper headline is about the Orlando mass murder in a night club. Fifty people are dead, killed by one person with an automatic weapon designed and manufactured to kill people in mass. It’s disgusting that they print that this is ‘unimaginable’.  The proper headline is ‘INEVITABLE’. 

Inhabitants of most of the modern world expected another mass murder record in the United States, another high count of victims gunned down by someone out to make a statement, someone who believes violence is the answer. If you carry that logic further, then you might think, more violence is a better answer. That’s apparently the NRA’s solution. More guns and more violence, and we’ll all be better.

It’s bullshit, but it’s not unimaginable. It was a matter of time. As racing cars go faster, as the wealthiest become wealthier, so will there be more and larger mass killings with automatic weapons in the United States. Why not? What policies have changed that would circumvent new bloody records from being set?

I’m a fiction writer. I can imagine killing and being a mass killer without actually being a killer, but just by being a cold, hard thinker. Learn from what other mass killers have done. Study the lessons learned. Decide on your course of action and put regrets aside. Segregate and compartmentalize your emotions. Rationalize your decision. Deal with the ramifications that you are going to kill and you will probably die. Pick your location, select your weapons, load up, block doors if you can, and go in and indiscriminately kill.

The headlines should be ‘SICKENING’. ‘DISGUSTING’. ‘REVOLTING’. ‘HEARTBREAKING’.

But never unimaginable, because, without making changes — and America is loathe to make changes about gun laws and automatic weapons, because there’s too much fear and profit in them, too much fraudulent machismo, too much shallow bravado and thin patriotism — more headlines  about mass killings will be published.

Unimaginable? No, the bar has been raised, 50 dead at this count, more critically wounded. Unimaginable? No, this will be another event that we’ll look back upon when the count goes higher again, another glance back to mourn the dead and increasing violence, all without doing a damn thing.

That’s what’s really ‘UNIMAGINABLE’.

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Good Omens

A restful night’s sleep.

(With interesting dreams.)

Happy cats.

(Fed, contented, and not fighting.)

The window sills painted.

(They look great.)

(And I am pleased.)

Blue sky and sunshine.

(No clouds at all!)

Warm weather.

(68 now but due to reach 84.)

Soft breeze.

(Cool with spring’s fading influence.)

(And fresh with blooms’ sweet fragrances.)

No redlights!

(This might be a first.)

The perfect table, in the perfect location.

(Quiet solitude to edit.)

An awesome quad shot 12 oz mocha.

(Non-fat.)

(And delicious.)

All signs are trending up.

(It’ll be a good session.)

Time to write like crazy.

(One more time.)

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Expectations for the Brain

This week, I enjoyed discovering and re-discovering reading regarding the brain and how it works, how we can change its workings, memory, and meditation’s effects on the brain. This all seems to be about practice, expectation, and changing expectations.

DelanceyPlace.com is a website that publishes excerpts from fascinating non-fiction. Back in 2015, they published an excerpt from a 2014 book. By Matthieu Ricard, Antoine Lutz and Richard J. Davidson, the book, Mind of the Meditator, is about how mastering a task transforms the brain’s pathways.

“The discovery of meditation‘s benefits coincides with recent neuroscientific findings showing that the adult brain can still be deeply transformed through experience. These studies show that when we learn how to juggle or play a musical instrument, the brain undergoes changes through a process called neuroplasticity. A brain region that controls the movement of a violinist’s fingers becomes progressively larger with mastery of the instrument. A similar process appears to happen when we meditate. Nothing changes in the surrounding environment, but the meditator regulates mental states to achieve a form of inner enrichment, an experience that affects brain functioning and its physical structure. The evidence amassed from this research has begun to show that meditation can rewire brain circuits to produce salutary effects not just on the mind and the brain but on the entire body. …”

Addressing how ‘the adult brain be still be be transformed through experience’, HuffPost had a related story this week, To Increase Your Well-being, Train Your Brain. Mimi O’Connor wrote, “Dr. Richard Davidson, neuroscientist and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, believes that practice is the key element in changing our brains for the better. He is well known for his pioneering study with Buddhist monks. In that study he hooked the monks up to fMRI machines and observed their brains as they meditated. The monks produced gamma waves, indicating intensely focused thought, which were 30 times as strong as the control groups.’ Additionally, large areas of the meditator’s brains were active, particularly in the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions. This study showed that conscious effort can change the neural structure, activity and function of the brain.” Dr. Richard Davidson was one of the other book’s authors, of course.

“Similar to the inspiring theme of the film Field of Dreams, “Build it and they will come,” Davidson’s motto seems to be, “Exercise them (neural pathways) and they will strengthen.”

Offering another point of view that affirms the same was Sophie McBain in Head in the Cloud. Her article addressed human memory and studies regarding the impact of computers and digital systems on our ability to remember. What becomes clear from her intriguing article is that, part of what affects our ability to remember, is our expectation of a need to remember. Here, in essence, we’re seeing the opposite impact of the other articles, where people who have computers to help them remember, don’t practice remembering, thereby weakening their ability to remember.

They’re all ripple effects, aren’t they, a sort of Doom Loop on the one hand, of expecting less and trying less, and so spiraling into achieving less, or conversely, a Halo Loop, of expecting more and trying harder.

Of course, I need to tie this back to writing. Practice writing, pursue it, try to master it, and the pathways and areas of the brain used for writing can be strengthened and transformed. Instead of believing you can’t, believe you can, and try. Being human, it’s rarely that simple, and people like Judith Sherven, PhD, can inject insights and ideas for re-working the subconscious programming behind the Doom Loop.

I’d also like to tie all of this back to time, reality and the nature of existence, but that’s for another post. Instead, I need to go off and write like crazy, at least one more time.

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The Writing Like Crazy Process

The writing like crazy is structured and unstructured, crazy and sane. Really, it just is. Such tautalogy is extremely helpful, isn’t it?

But it is what it is (there’s that help again). Originally structured to shift me from the real world’s insanity to the pleasurable world of writing and editing fiction, the process was all about release. Let me go, job, wife, cats, house, bills, stress, frustration, whatever. Take me away, writing.

The early days began as an after work period. Go somewhere in the house and write. That didn’t work too well, and I blame me. I couldn’t stop myself from falling into normal home routines and thoughts. I initiated a program to go somewhere else and write. Armed with a Z4 pen (my preference) and black and white marble composition notebooks (I was always alert for notebook sales), I usually ended up in a coffee shop, where I would have coffee. Coffee shops were tested like bath water until the ones that worked just right emerged. I was traveling for business often in those years, so I would often write in airplanes and airports.

But my hours and routine were iffy. When home, I often ended up writing only on weekends (at Printers Inc), by getting up early. That wasn’t enough, so the program was expanded to an extended lunch hour at work. Testing the process, I discovered that walking improved my writing mood, so I parked about a mile from the coffee shop and walked. In 1999-2000,  I could be spotted in San Mateo, California, walking to a Starbucks. As my company moved its office to Shoreline in Mountain View, I drove to downtown Mountain View and used that Starbucks. Meanwhile, I lived in Half Moon Bay and walked each Saturday and Sunday morning to La Di Da. After moving to Ashland, Oregon, in 2005, I began walking the town to coffee shops. The marble composition books were replaced by laptops.

In those days, I set a word count target, and I tracked it meticulously. There was no pay it forward, no credits and debits. 1,000 words needed to be reached each day, every day. Even if I did 2,000 one day, 1,000 was required the next day. I never let myself off that hook.

With each refinement, I learned more about myself and my writing process. I discovered I was an organic writer, writing with scant mapping or outlining. I found that writing like crazy was critical. Writing like crazy meant that I shoved aside thoughts of grammar, facts, punctuation, and sometimes even point of view and character, and just rode a wave of words rushing into my mind. Then I’d go back and fix it all. When I stalled, I learned to create snapshots to find direction. Snapshots were just exploratory summaries to help me find understanding of the character(s), setting(s), plot, concept, story line, whatever. They were generally not meant for reader consumption, except for my reading.

Learning and evolving fortunately continued. I learned to ask, why, why, why did this character do this or that, or this or that happened, along with the corollary matters of when, what and how.  I saw how I told and then showed the same thing, how I tended toward passive writing, how I enjoyed run on sentences and became more mindful of them – when editing – but how, becoming aware of them, fixing them were folded into my writing like crazy process. I learned what I really enjoyed reading by critiquing others, good and bad, for my own enjoyment, and then shaping my voice to be what I most enjoyed in those books, and I threw the reading doors open to all genres and authors.

I’ve always ‘written in my head’, phantom writing, where I see or hear a scene or the developing story. I found how to harvest the essence of those moments and pick them up and put them into the story. I taught myself to be unafraid to revise and edit as I wrote, discovering that fiction writing was much more like creating a painting then it was like writing an essay. And I encouraged myself to have fun.

I no longer have a daily word count. They’re not needed and I often find myself writing several thousand words. The shift to writing mind is much easier now. I can pick up the story line and where I was quickly in my mind and typically pick up where I was with just a few moments of thought.

I’ve written a number of novels, but haven’t published but two. They’re both recent after wearying myself with the agent/publisher route. Each agent had different requirements, and that tedious process drained my joy and optimism, as well as savaging my writing time. So, fuck it, I’ve gone the ebook self-publishing route. I don’t have great expectations, but I won’t be a fraud and claim it doesn’t matter; it does. But, just as with the writing process, and most of everything else I’ve done in life, I’ll keep trying, keep working on it, and I’m confident, I’ll continue progressing.

Now…time to write like crazy, one more time.

 

 

 

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